Fright of the unread

OK, game's up. You know which ones they are. Yes, those ones. The ones staring at you reproachfully each time you walk past your bookshelf. Not so clever now, are we? Yes, it turns out that one in three of us - so few? - have bought a book simply to look intelligent. Though titles such as Andrea Levy's Small Island, Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Paul Coelho's The Alchemist all do well on the literary hit parade, very few have actually, er, read them.

Fright of the unread

OK, game's up. You know which ones they are. Yes, those ones. The ones staring at you reproachfully each time you walk past your bookshelf. Not so clever now, are we? Yes, it turns out that one in three of us - so few? - have bought a book simply to look intelligent. Though titles such as Andrea Levy's Small Island, Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Paul Coelho's The Alchemist all do well on the literary hit parade, very few have actually, er, read them.

Monday 24 October 2005 08.01 EDT
First published on Monday 24 October 2005 08.01 EDT

OK, game's up. You know which ones they are. Yes, those ones. The ones staring at you reproachfully each time you walk past your bookshelf. The ones with the curiously fresh-looking pages. The ones that are still, clearly, at least a decade old.

It turns out that one in three of us - so few? - have bought a book simply to look intelligent. Though titles such as Andrea Levy's Small Island, Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Paul Coelho's The Alchemist all do great business in bookshops, very few of us have actually, er, read them.

If the figures are to be believed, only one in 20 people have actually got through Yann Martel's bestselling The Life of Pi, while fewer than one in 25 of us, though we queued up to buy it in our millions, have bothered to cut through the magic-realist thickets of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Weak, we are. Weak.

Yet perhaps there's a bigger point buried in all this: is the crush of literary prizes now dominating the publishing calendar actually turning readers off? In the past few months alone we've had the Man Booker prize, the Orange prize (and, this year, the Orange Best of Best), the Nobel (bit of a special case, but still) and the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize, and there are still our very own Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbreads to come before Christmas. If you stick simply to the UK winners, never mind the shortlists, that's seven new hardbacks; if you factor in Pinter's complete oeuvre, it's time to book that van to Ikea.

That said, maybe it's time to 'fess up. My most ashamed intellectual vanity purchase - and already the sticky bloom of embarrassment is creeping up my neck - is Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which at the very point of purchase I knew I was never, ever going to read (hopefully now I'll be pressured into it). Then there's the multiple collections of Geoffrey Hill poems, bought - why, God, why? - because they were on special offer but also in the vain hope that I could somehow blackmail myself into making time.

But at least I'm ahead of the curve in one respect: not having shelled out for A Brief History of Time, I've never felt under pressure to leave it mock-casually on my bedside table, still less scribble intelligent-looking notes in the margins.